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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."
The result? Over 1000 patents and many inventions that we take for granted today.
Bad slashbot. Patents are always evil. You are not correctly disseminating RMSthought or ESRspeak.
Time for re-ned-ucation!
--saint
Imagine of they had the Internet back in Edison's day.
"Hey, did you invent that light bulb yet"
"Sorry boss, I spent all day downloading 'Naughty Knickers 6'"
The Great Depression.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Sure this is a geek friendly story, but "internet time" which was called "hard work" at one point isn't limited to high tech. Have you ever tried to start your own company in any field? I have and yes, you do work for pennies and you do work twice or three times the hours your pals work all for a gamble that you can carve a niche out for yourself in your local economy.
I still say tesla was covered up by edison and it still going on today. Oh well I'm just paranoid.
Phrontist=Geek
T( H)GSB Apr 21-27
Trying to keep up with Edison, who survived on little sleep and recharged with catnaps on top of his desk,
Reading this in one of the physics labs at uni. I decided this method might be the way to increase my grades and come up with that pesky solution, I mean, if it worked for such an obviously great inventor and man as Edison, surely it oculd do something for me!
So of course, I curled up on one of the benches in the labs, for a quick nap. let me suggest: DONT DO THIS! they dont like having students sleeping on their equipment.
.... of course, the very blurry hologram of my big toe is rather amusing
c - a blessed +5 grain of salt
Big difference between a research lab refining the lightbulb, and a zillion overfunding dot-bombs selling dog food at a $50 loss per customer.
Staying up all night trying to fix yet another eCommerce site before the VC funding dries up is 100% perspiration and 0% inspiration.
Here is the complete list of inventions and patents of thomas a. edison. truly a remarkable man.
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.
But I'll bet Thomas Edison's crew didn't have Nerf guns.
We'll be regarding the "one click" patent as the greatest innovation of mandkind!
Just you wait.
Companies have had to please stakeholders since at least the seventeenth century. Where do you think the Jamestown Colony got its funding from?
So he had a bunch of researchers amassed in a big thinktank operation. This is similar to the decentralized Internet exactly how?
Unlike the Internet, Edison spawned entire useful industries. Unless you call revolutionizing the distribution of pornography a spectacular human achievement, there's nothing approaching what Edison accomplished here. Comparing the two is just silly.
Just about the only similarity I can see is in the realm of disputed patents, namely Edison's quadruplex telegraph, which A&PTC and Western Union bitterly squabbled about. But then again, disputed patents are nothing new either.
Here's a task for you to try:
Go check your encyclopedia to find the answers to the following questions: (answers are given in parentheses)
1) Who invented the radio? (Marconi)
2) Who discovered X-rays? (Roentgen)
3) Who invented the vacuum tube amplifier? (de Forest)
In fact, while you're at it, check to see who discovered the fluorescent bulb, neon lights, speedometer, the automobile ignition system, and the basics behind radar, electron microscope, and the microwave oven.
Chances are that you will see little mention of a guy named Nikola Tesla, the most famous scientist in the world at the turn of the century.
In fact, few people today have ever heard of the guy. Good old Tommy Edison made sure of that.
(copied from a website)..
So why is Edison so great? Because he used foul tactics to crush better inventors?
Of course, Gates is not Edison, but think about how today's events are going to look in the future. That may give you a bit of a better idea of what to think of the past.
...was the electric hammer!
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
They didn't mention two of Edison's most famous inventions, the automatic hammer, and the 6-legged chair.
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.
I heard most code jockeys at Microsoft are bred to be addicted to ketricel white.
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?
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.)
Here's an excerpt of a supposedly true story about Tesla, now you know why I'm looking for objective data:
"After his death in 1943, his TeslaScope interplanetary communication device was turned on at the home of a friend in Canada, and the assembled group heard the Commander of an Alien vessel, explain the true hidden facts behind Tesla's fantastic 87 year life. Tesla apparently didn't discover until fairly late in his life, that he himself was an Alien, who had been left on Earth as a baby to help the people of the Earth evolve through the use of his inventive genius. From early childhood it was clear that he was quite different and odd compared to more "normal" Earth humans. The Commander mentioned that they had attended Tesla's funeral, and they had simply blurred all the photographs so that there would be no record of their attendance."
"Derp de derp."
Joseph Swan, from the great city of Sunderland, did.
The light bulb
Edison improved it.
0xB
There is a differnce between what we used to call "Workaholism" and "Internet Time"... Workaholism is a refusal to stop working (or prompting to work) for a measured period of time to force either change or innovation through personal or redirected physical, mechanical and technological means...
Internet time, however, is a different beast... For lack of a better word, it is a mental dependance on instantaneous gratification, eg: if it doesn't happen the nanosecond you think of or want it, bitch gripe and moan until someone does it for you (if you don't do it yourself)... Your music, videos, or websites must load now now now, and if your distributed computing doesn't come to par, it's not your fault, it's the guy running the (pick the OS you gripe about the most) OS of the week...
Your attention spans are measured in seconds, not minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, or even years... If the work isn't done by then, then an incredible offense has been performed, the likes of which are worthy of jihad du jour, flamewars, or what have you... Take this from someone who was diagnosed with ADHD over 20 years ago, most of those today make me look like an attentive, slow, and otherwise average representative member of society *gag*...
For a best case example, compare this to Linux users who wait months for the newest kernel to fix their bugs, as opposed to those who wait weeks for Microsoft to come up with their patches/service packs... Microsoft is expected to rebuild a OS (from scratch) far faster than Linux, and is condemnned the moment it exceeds hours past another exploit being exposed, while Linux users wait patiently for months for the equivelent being released...
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
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.
I thought internet time referred to breaking time into an easy to understand system based on clicks or something.. A quick search on google will back up my assumption.. whats this have anything to do with Thomas Edison?
Are you getting dc or ac power from the wall?
Whose electric motors provide basicly all electricity created by man?
Whose electric motors are used for almost every electromechanical device?
There is no field where edison and tesla competed, in which edison made a better invention. In most istances Tesla completely overshadowed edison.
Tesla lost in financial and public relations matters, he often lost government contracts, but as far as inventing goes - he blew edison away.
Do you remember the slashdot story about an year ago about how the Smithsonian put edison's bust over tesla's inventions.
The edison companies were big sponsors.
So yeah it still goes on.
What is more paranoid to think about are some of the Tesla files that are still in fbi custody.
Are they keeping them secret because of incompetence, or is there something truly interesting in there?
they invented stuff...
The dotcommers only invented creative ways to do nothing with lots of money!
The ITAA, the anti-engineer lobbying group which is bankrolled by Microsoft, IBM and others, did away a few years ago with FLSA laws for "computer operators" which require overtime pay.
From government statistics, we know that Americans have surpassed even the Japanese in the hours worked per week and per year - Americans work more hours than people in any country in the world. This is very good for those who own the companies - the 1% of the US population that owns 42.2% of the stock. How about everyone else though?
Well, as the average working week gets longer and longer over the past thirty years, the average US inflation-adjusted hourly wage has dropped. Anyone who has a pulse can see what's been happening in the IT field lately - layoffs (with those over-burdened people still around picking up the "slack"), frozen wages, falling wages, ever expanding workloads requiring ever more hours worked.
If you work for yourself, and thus all work you do will profit you, then yes, hard work *does* pay off. If you're a wage slave working for someone else, all the unpaid overtime you work, all the hours on call you work are just making your boss look good, and the people who really own your company more wealthy. By really own I mean the people who really own your company, not the 1000 shares of underwater options you get that vest over 4-5 years and which are 0.000001% of the total shares, minus the strike price.
Sorry, I hear enough of this stick-and-carrot stuff at work, I hear people say it here and I have to say, BS! I wish I had listened to the guys at the Programmer's Guild during the bubble when they were pointing out how rising H1-B caps and the destruction of FLSA laws. If one looks at the industry polls which show engineers getting farther and farther away from the 40 hour workweek, it becomes apparent how many suckers there are in this industry. When somebody *aside from yourself* is getting your labor time for free, than you are the sucker.
My opinion of Thomas Edison was forever altered when I read about one of his inventions, the electric chair It was an invention to show how dangerous AC current was by associating in the public's mind the horrible execution of people with Westinghouse's AC power, rather than the more benign DC that Edison was hawking. As for the spirit of invention in the old days, it was quite a marvel that he was able to do so many things, but thankfully in this internet revolution, with all its new inventions, there's no comparison to an electric chair. No modern death by spam, (although, slow death by cellphone may be an option) or the like. However, you must appreciate that he was one man that changed the world in a way that it would take the entire internet to do.
Oh my GOD I've never witnessed such geek hatred in my life! Well, except for the Bill Gates thing... but sheesh! The man's DEAD! (Wait, did someone create an everlasting-life machine that he put his name on?)
Okay, I'll admit that I'm getting something of an education about Edison and all the things he didn't do successfully on his own, but sheesh... the hatred! The bitterness! The utter contempt!
Some of you people should put yourselves in check... or in one of those funny couches, or maybe even one of those jackets without the holes for the hands to come out of...
"Just because he was successful, you guys all hate him! You're just jealous and always trying to bring him down!"
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!
Edison's actual lab in Menlo Park was about 20 people in one big room. The whole place, with much of the original equipment, was rebuilt at Greenfield Village in Dearborn, MI, and can be seen there.
General Electric, which was formed by the merger of the Edison businesses and Thomas-Houston of Cleveland, became a very big company, of course. But that wasn't Edison's lab, although he was on the board of directors of GE for a while. Nor did GE ever do R&D in Menlo Park. GE R&D was (and is) in Schenectady, New York.
There's a substantial literature on Edison's life and lab. There are even movies; after all, he invented those, too.
...likening Edison to Gates is quite on-the-mark.
As inventors / innovators, they have a great deal in common. They lack the sublime genius of their superior contemporaries (Tesla in Edison's day, Doug Engelbart in Bill Gates' day...). But what they lack in true vision they more than compensate for in cunning and ambition.
100 years from now, our great grandchildren will probably be informed by the education system that Bill Gates invented personal computing singlehandledly, in addition to the GUI and a bunch of other crap. The gazillions of dollars in the Gates trust will constantly be invested in extending the historical footprint of William Gates III, even while parts are also appropriated to noble philanthropic causes.
Some of you Linux-loving libertarian squints are telling yourselfs, "Ah! But you're wrong! Because the Internet will have a perfect record of today's history! The media in Tesla's day wasn't digital- it wasn't permanent. That's how he got so marginalized over time."
And all I can say is that whatever the digital network ends up turning into - even if its the bloody Matrix itself - or its a global cashless society where you can't buy or sell without having a barcode tattoo- it is going to be owned and operated by Microsoft.
Sucks. But history's gonna repeat itself. Until it ends.
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.)
goes something like this:
:)
:)
Tesla apparently figured out how to turn the entire planet into a giant battery so that, in order to get power, you'd simply stick a copper pole in the ground. He went to J.P. Morgan and asked for some cash to implement his idea. Morgan listened and then asked Tesla how exactly he was supposed to charge people for it.
It's a shame he was so nuts (he lived in a hotel room filled with pigeons, hated spherical objects and was terrified of body hair) some of his ideas would've been wonderful to try, even if they didn't work. I mean, the guy invented the radio (marconi got the credit but Tesla got the patent)
None of this is secret, so why do so many people still credit Edison with the invention and who do they think the "Swan" was in the Edision Swan Co?
Davy (of the Davy safty lamp fame) had invented a bulb even earlier but it worked by producing an arc rather than an incandescent filament.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
However fascinating may Edison's Lab be, the truth is that no significant invention came out of it, in decades of work. All the major discoveries made by Thomas Edison were made before the existence of this lab (which was built, logically, after he had already made a fortune).
The most significant discovery coming from Edison 's Lab is the lab in itself, that is, the concept of the modern research laboratory, which appeared for the first time in the US, not long after Louis Pasteur's labs in Paris.
Tesla was first an inventor and second a showman, he absolutely sucked at business. Edison on the other hand would RUN to the nearby patent office when he had a new invention.
Telsa invented these, among other things:
The whole AC system that we use today including:
Rotating magnetic field and the motors/generators that use it. Polyphase. The Transformers to convert to high/low frequency for transmission.
Flourescent lights
Arc lights
Radio (Supreme court said he had it first)
Radar
The first remote controlled vehicle (small boats he made for the army)
X-ray (go read his bio's before arguing)
The Tesla coil (you probably have one in your monitor/tv)
First truly accurate oscillator
The Tesla turbine
Electricity collector from the difference in voltage from the sky/ground. (kinda like the recent 'tether' experiment on the shuttle. but from the ground)
Toward his later years he was working on wireless transmission of electricity. also the 'death ray' he was working on was nothing more than a anti-airplane beam that would melt their engines through inductance.
All his life it was his dream to harness the power of niagra falls, which he did. Westinghouse put him in charge of setting it up, but tesla only hung around for a short time. He wanted to get back to inventing stuff.
It's a good thing the world sucks or we'd all fall off.
i would say chemical use in general can correlate directly to the customers interest in software/systems changes. in a support group, programming work is steady and dull. in a development environment, the work is sporadic and at the whim of the project sponsor. when they want a project completed, it has to be as cheep and quick as possible. when they need nothing, you're corporate over head.
Management is hard, middle management is easy. The fact that you report to a middle manager that is a 9-5er doesn't mean they all are. Once you find senior managers that are successful, they work like dogs. Most are out at a reasonable hour because they are in by 7. Want to reach the CEO of a major corporation without being intercepted by his secretary? Call before 8 AM, after 6 PM, or Saturday morning (before their golf game, most are at their desks).
Outside of being born rich, there is no shortcut. Those that go into management as the easy route become middle managers where they stay for the rest of their lives. Even the cookie cutters work hard, they dog for 60-75 hour weeks for 3 years to get into a top MBA program. If they rock a top MBA program, they graduate and are 6-8 years away from financial success, but they bust ass to get there.
Sure, these guys may appear like spoiled children, but ask their families how often they are at the office. The fact that slashdot says it doesn't make it true. I've worked at startups where management has their act together, we all bust ass for a common vision. When management doesn't put in the hours or effort, I was out early. Now that I have my own business, I try to lead by example and bust ass all the time. And if you think that lunch meetings or weekend meetings are taking a vacation, you're a fool. I think about my company from the time I wake up till I go to bed.
The MIT media lab is a joke, great on spin, low on anything. No one puts in a full day of work, the PhD students sometimes work. The undergrads that work their suck down free money. It's an overfunded lab, they by toys to play with and make silly demos. They are mostly smoke-and-mirrors, with the job of spinning things for MIT's PR game.
Alex
Gates, on the other hand, can make no such claims. While I agree with you to some extent that Xerox PARC was like the Daimler-Benz of its day, that is to say too much in the lab but lacking most of the engineering and development time to take it out, you are ignoring the likes of Apple and other groups that did and could have done just as well. Without getting into a holy war, I believe it is quite reasonable to assert that Gates' Windows and MS-DOS won the industry because of the nature of the PC industry (e.g., compatibility) and because of the backing of IBM and such. Gates could have easily have been replaced by IBM and we would be looking at an entirely different company. (That said, I will give Gates some credit for having the intelligence and tenacity to grab other markets,...but that's a seperate argument).
Without saying "me too", in so many words...
I absolutely agree with what you are saying, it's irks me to see slashdot's repeated dismissal of all things corporate and praise for all things academic. While I don't necessarily agree that upper management at publically held firms are always or generally right, slashdot is seriously deluding themselves if they think it's that easy.
None of this makes him a good person, Edison was still an evil, helpless-animal murdering, bastard.
But ideas are clean of their promulagators, inherently.
Large scale energy trasmission by HF RF is ABSOLUTLE BULLSHIT! People freak out over 0.2 watt uW transmission from their cell phones and yet bathing in gigawatt RF transmitting our daily power is in any way a workable idea? We'd need RF transmission towers radiating millions of times more energy that a typical 50,000 watt FM station! Tesla was a brilliant mad man. He invented someinteresting stuff, but his plans for putting it to use were absolutely insane.
Thank god AC power won out over Edisons DC wishes however. Though maybe there's a lesson here for you conspiricy theorists out there. DC power transmission would also have been insane. And as usual saner and more practical heads prevailed. So now we have easily transmitted low loss AC power transmission and by WIRES not RF!
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
Two Words. Nikola Tesla.
Shortly after WW2, several major electronics companies filed patents on "Digital Logic Gates".
The patents were denied, the USPTO cited several of Tesla's patents for the same system implemented in his devices.
The end result? Digital logic stayed public domain.
Some people say the telegraph was the InterNet release 0.0. That was the first time the world had communication at the speed of light. Sammuel Morse even invented a clever compression protocol- the Morse Code. The first killer app was the newspaper. News a couple weeks old wasn't interesting, but same day news from across the ocean was.
Take MAS.100, commonly called Pizza for Credit (if its still offered), which was a 6 unit (2 credit) course where you would eat Pizza and listen to people in the Media Lab explain what they do. One year it was dropped from a 3 hour class to a 2 hour class because the money for pizza wasn't there, yet the course was still a "3 hour classtime" class. You'd be floored at what gets funded there.
Have a friend who works in the Media Lab take you on a tour (not the official one) and see what really goes on. Go in before 9 (I've been there on middle of the night reuse runs when I was an undergrad... don't ask, but I have some 15 year old Decstations to show for it), it's empty. Show up after 5, find a professor that is working.
The Media Lab gets a lot of money from some corporations who can't cooperate on some of the research so they all chip in to the Media Lab. 20%-25% of the Media Lab produces stuff, the rest just plays with expensive toys to stroke their own ego... Don't worry, within a few years the new researchers will learn how to play with toys, then crank out another stupid demo right before the corporate donors come on a tour. It's a really sad organization.
CMU is a very different school from The Institute.
BTW: The fact that your friends are business majors and want a cushy job doesn't mean that they will graduate and get a cushy job. I mean, I wanted to graduate and get a cush job that pays a lot, I also want a million dollars, and a pony. You don't get things just for wanting them, you inherit them, marry into them, or earn them.
Neither, the operative term is "Irony"... Maybe Slashdot should have a moderation category for that?
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
as far as i remember there are two theories on what he was working on
1. his idea to deliver electricity to every household without the need for wires by sending oscilating current in the ground.
2. some people say that he wanted to create some kind of a military invention
btw trying to communicate with aliens does not neccessarily make you insane. Are the people at SETI insane?