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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."
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.
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.
Tesla was ok, I guess... I mean "Signs" was pretty cool, but they kinda disappeared after that, it seems...
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.
However, you'll notice that Edison only patented his idea of passing electricity though a special filament in order to make light. He did not patent the idea of making light. He patented the idea for a phonograph which could reproduce sounds encoded on a wax cilender. He did not patent the idea of recording and playing back music.
Sleep is for the weak!
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))"
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.)
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.
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
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!