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Living on Internet Time... Like Thomas Edison Did
securitas writes: "If you think that dotcommers are the first people to live on Internet time, then take a trip to the 19th century (NYT Story, here's a Yahoo link). Thomas Edison had 10,000 researchers and scientists working at his Menlo Park labs, who slept on their desks, and had the same problems pleasing the investment community as today's tech companies. The result? Over 1000 patents and many inventions that we take for granted today."
Edison is perhaps one of the most overrated figures in American History. Like Darwin, his political clout helped him to become the known inventor of things which had been developed elsewhere at the same time.
Consider a story also about the corporate workplace, "Working with Einstiens."
Heres a quote from a news segment I've seen:
Reporter: "Mr. Edison, how do you feel about Einstiens theory of relativity?"
Edison: "Well, I don't quite understand it."
Edison inspired his staff by working EXTREMELY hard all of the time. Also, because of this, he was certianly qualified to be the boss: he was the one who made it happen, and he didn't play golf to do it. Can the same be said of the local IT industry? Is the management a group of people who got there because their career path in life was to work harder than their peers? Or did they choose a path that they thought would net them the most money with the least amount of work?
My guess is on the latter for most management.
I like Edison's management technique a lot better:
"What a man's mind can create, a man's character can control."
His character gave him the respect and admiration of his assistants, who helped him with the mundane task of trying out thousands of different materials to find just the right one for the light bulb, among other things. Do you think we find the same in the IT industry? Will I do something "stupid" for someone else because I have faith in them? I think not. I'd only do it for a high rate of pay.
There is a place akin to this one: MIT media lab, as well as a lot of other Universities throughout the world, where the professors work like dogs for a lot less pay than they would get if they would sell some of their inventions on their own. But don't be so haughty as to compare this lab to IT.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
He hired tons of "the best and brightest" and then allowed the press to claim their hard work as his own genius.
He tried his best to squash anyone who wanted to do it differently than him. See Nickolai Tesla, for example.
He pushed inferior technologies because of their proprietariness and money making possiblities. If it were up to him, we'd all have DC from every outlet in our homes, with Edison power plants every two city blocks (because DC doesn't transfer over long distances). He staged demonstrations in large metropolitan areas where he would electrocute elephants and horses to show the dangers of AC.
He was an IP-grubbing exploiter.
He wanted to unitarilly squash anyone who dared compete with him. See Westinghouse
Luckily, he eventually lost most of these battles. Let's hope Gates fares so well.
A collaborator of Edison, George Eastman of Eastman Kodak, behaved like our own Bill Gates. Eastman tried to corner the patents on the new technology of mass production photographic equipment - lots of good stories about him stiff arming competitors and trying to become a monopolist.
Gives you an opportunity to see what happens to technology monopolists after a hundred years. Got Fuji?
What I wouldn't give to be as nasty as to
hook a horse to an AC circuit and electrocute
it over the course of 40 minutes to defame
my arch-nemesis Westinghouse. It's just too
bad we have these animal rights laws and so
many countries have dispatched with the death
penalty. Oh the evil I could get away with what
with all the identity theft and lack of privacy
and copyright stupidity. I'd line up all you
geeks and make an example out of you for trying
to break into MY market. Damn your cursed
"social progress"!!!
Does that list include the electrocution of stray animals as well?
Think I'm joking?
Edison did just that, in order to "prove" that Tesla/Westinghouse's newfangled Alternating Current was "dangerous". With this we can see that perhaps Edison's true invention was FUD, plain and simple.
The transistor. Without it, we'd be stuck with vacuum tubes. The transistor revolutionized the world by creating the information age. We can credit Edison for the wasteful incandescent buld and a wax phonograph, but how many people use those now? Flourescent lights were invented not long after the incandescent bulb, and not by Edison.
The radio. The radio finally allowed communication across long distances without a wire. It revolutionized warfare and entertainment.
The Turing machine. While not a physical machine, it was Alan Turing's amazing machine that changed the world. The first definition of a computer, soon followed by crude mechanical and vacuum tube devices (which were built by Turing & his team)
To summarize, Edison was not such a great inventor. There were dozens of others who have affected our lives in much more powerful ways. Marconi, Tesla, Turing. Edison actually silenced these inventors using his fame and political clout.
Just my 2 cents.
D/\ Gooberguy
Karma: Meh (Mostly from meh.)
Of course we can only speculate, but I think people will look back at Gates the way they look back at Henry Ford. Gates never claimed to invent the GUIs or OSs. He simply produced an OS that was popular and you could have your applications in any color you liked, as long as they were Windows applications. Likewise, Ford never claimed to invent the automobile. Daimler and Benz had the first practical car, but it was Ford that put them in the hands of millions of Americans and sparked the real revolution. Much like Gates' OS, Ford's cars were "good enough" and offered little choice in style. That was the right tactic for the first few years of the auto, and it was the right tactic for the first few years of computing.
Of course Daimler and Benz did just fine and became a premium brand--like Apple. There were certainly automobiles prior to Daimler-Benz. These would be analogous to the prototypes turned out by Xerox PARC or the DoD. They failed to reach the market either because the inventors were hogtied by short-sighted backers (Xerox) or because the projects were not suitable for the mass market (ENIAC).
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
His patent predates Marconi's.
He didnt make the commercial system before marconi because tesla was trying to use the investor's money to secretly develop another invention.
Right on!
In today's world, laws that were designed to protect people are twisted and gnarled to be used against people. I once read that as a small self-employed inventor you will need two or more patents to protect your invention. If you have only one, larger companies will be able to exploit your ideas. When you decide to sue the large company, good luck!
Large companies, on the other hand, utilize patents to control markets and lock out competitors. The whole system needs to be reviewed.
Tesla's autobiography is up on E2.
A really good recent biography of
Thomas Edison is:
Thomas A. Edison
A Streak of Luck
by Rober Conot
amen.
kicked off the first truly big stock market bubble - electricity companies. bugs bunny numbers and valuations, just like the internet bubble.
followed shortly by the automobile and radio bubble.
the crash, boom, alakazam... Great Depression time....
well... at least this time, we dont have a horribly pro-big business president. doh.
... hi bingo
The point here being that over 10,000 people had to give up their life and spend it at work, including sleeping overnight on/under their desks. Their reward? Edison got over 1,000 patents.
Let me repeat that for the slower people out there. EDISON got more than 1,000 patents off the sweat and sacrifice of living standards (social life, family life, reasonable rest and personal life) of those 10,000 employees.
Just like today.
I promise you Scott McNealy isn't staying after work all night and crashing for a couple hours curled in a ball under his desk like a large number of his employees are. Same with Bill Gates and Carla Fiorina.
Not in the way Edison was trying to claim.
Telsa thought AC was the way to go for long distance power transmission; he'd fallen out with Edison after Edison had already ripped him off, and took the idea to Westinghouse.
Edison, meanwhile, had invested a lot in using DC for long distance transmission, even though it's quite inferior. Since he couldn't compete on the merits of the technology he was pushing, he ran a campaign to try and scare people away from AC by pointing to its use in the electric chair, and by slaughtering animals with AC driven apparatus.
Of course, at the kind of volatages and currents used for transmission, DC is just as dangerous as AC (grab the poisitive 550V DC terminal on a Wellington trolley bus while grounded if you don't believe me), but Edison wasn't about to allow the pesky facts to get in the way.
There is another side, no part of which takes anything away from Edison's accomplishments. He paid kids a quarter for puppies and kittens he could electrocute in his demonstarations of how dangerous AC power is, and even electrocuted an adult male elephant. He filmed the spectacle. He was little more than a gangster when it came to promoting his businesses, using every dirty trick in the book to intimidate the competition and gain a monopoly on movies and their distribution. No one knows how frequently he took credit for the work of others, but my guess is he was very good at it. He often slept curled up like a dog on old newspapers in a closet beneath the stairs--just another manifestation of a unique, driven personality. A fascinating man, but in my book, by no means totally admirable. A lot of his inventions, in fact all of them, I suspect, would have been made by others in time. We would not be reading by candlelight today if Edison had been run over by a beer wagon. If he was such a total genius, why did he seriously propose DC power? IMHO Bell Labs, not Edison, played a greater role in the development of technology, and Edison is sixty percent hype and forty percent solid contributions. Certainly old Thos. A. was nowhere near the intellectual equal of Maxwell, whose theoretical work was vastly more important and seminal. Still--credit where credit is due!
Considering the over-emphisis of techinical education in this joint, it might be interesting to the readers that the the system of economic and social relations in the US from 1930 to 1970 is commonly called "Fordism" by historians.
Ford's 5 Dollar Day, in some corners, gets credit for saving the country from socialism.
Tesla's experiments into wireless energy transmission would have spelled the end of the energy industry as we know it, as well as the end of conventional radio and television transmission as a limited resource doled out by the FCC, as we have seen all of this become. His Autobiography is very interesting albiet very quirky. It is also interesting to note that over half of his patents and papers remain classified by the U.S. government to this day. Try getting them through the FOIA act, I dare you. It would actually be an interesting experiment. You can read about alleged uses and abuses of Tesla's wireless technology in the book about Project HAARP, entitled Angels Don't Play This haarp: Advances in Tesla Technology which puts forth evidence that Project HAARP's goals aren't as benign as they would like you to think, and that the weather modification aspect of the techology has been tried extensively for less than good purposes. Food for thought and grounds for further research. (http://www.haarp.net/ HAARP book home page.)
You see, DC cannot travel long distances at high voltages or with a lot of amps. AC, on the other hand, can, and Tesla recognized this.
:-)
I hear people say this all the time. I work as a consultant to Bonneville Power Administration (US DOE), which is the holder of many long-distance power intertie lines. The high voltage DC "tie-line" that connects BPA (Oregon) to Los Angeles (California ISO) regularly sends hundreds of megawatts an hour to California, with far lower loss than the AC tie-lines. I know, because I work on the software that helps schedule transmission
I'm not entirely sure why this is, but perhaps someone in the energy business can fill in why...
Working on E-Tag 1.7? E-mail pblee@bpa.gov!