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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'"
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.
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.
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!
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.
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?
Tesla was a brilliant inventor, who did come up with several interesting innovations, and didn't really get the recognition he deserved.
He was also, however, quite mad, and near the end of his life started working on some really far-out death-ray kinds of things. Unfortunately, too many people online have latched onto his latter "inventions" as being something other than dementia.
A good source about the life of Tesla is Clifford Pickover's book, Strange Brains and Genius : The Secret Lives of Eccentric Scientists and Madmen.
What I'm really curious about is why this fringe cult has grown up around Tesla. I mean, there have been plenty of unappreciated inventors before (look at Philo Farnsworth), and crackpot scientists, but for some reason the fringe people have a thing about Tesla in particular.
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.
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.
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.)