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Edison Would Have Loved New Light Bulb Law, Says His Great-Grandson
New submitter futuristic writes with a link to Thomas Edison's great-grandson's take on Thomas Edison and the alleged demise of the incandescent light bulb. From the article: "My great grandfather's 100-watt incandescent will be replaced with new energy-efficient versions, including CFLs, LEDs, and — yes — new and improved incandescent bulbs. ... And my great-grandfather wouldn't have it any other way."
Absolute bullshit. As much as any sensible man should support the new lightbulb law, Edison was *not* a sensible man. All you need to know to figure out his stance on old outdated technology versus new, superior technology is this: DC vs. AC, Edison vs. Tesla.
...that had Thomas Edison been alive today, he would have held the patents on these assorted new lightbulbs.
Really?
Chances are he would have held one or more patents on the new light bulb so it would have been a source of income for him.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
...he just bought the patent from two Toronto inventors http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Woodward_(inventor)
"Consider the lillies of the goddamn field."
Well this is refreshing; it looks like the truth. Usually people cramming words into the mouths of the dead are self-serving, bullshit-spewing weirdos. Either that or maudlin, irrelevant losers.
This guy, on the other hand, is a university professor who appears to have actual research behind his claims. It goes against him, of course, that he's attempting to improve or revive his famous great-grandfather's reputation with this article, but the research looks real and I presume it's open to review.
How refreshing.
You can already get around the restrictions if you want an old fashioned light bulb, they're just called Heatballs instead. Two guys in Germany started marketing them as "heaters that fit into a light socket" last year after a similar law went through in the EU.
But only because we've got technology they didn't back then. When it comes to long distance transmission, voltage is key because of Ohms law. The more current you have the bigger your conductor has to be to prevent loss.
Well transformers can easily and quite efficiently step up and down AC voltage. So you can have hundreds of thousands of volts, far more than you'd want in a home, over a distribution line. There was no equivalent technology for DC back when the current wars were going on.
Now there is, thyristors. They are solid state devices that do a good job of efficient DC-DC conversion. So it is possible today to do HVDC lines and indeed it is done. There are some advantages (like no skin effect).
Prior to that the best there was is mercury arc valves. Those worked and were used, but had some serious limits. Even then, they didn't come on the scene until about the 1920s, and the current wars were back in the 1880s.
So sure, if we redesigned the grid today, maybe DC would make sense, however there are some things that AC works really well for. Thing is, we didn't design it today, we designed it in the 1800s and back then, AC was it. Edison's DC plan called for there to be generators all over the place since long runs were out of the question. That is a shitty way to do things, not only because you don't want generators in your neighborhood but because as with many things, generators scale with efficiency in terms of size.
Heh. That's pretty much what I was going to say.. If he had the patent(s) on it, he'd praise it as the best thing since ... well ... the light bulb. If he didn't, he'd be pushing all the reasons that it was horrible and dangerous.
That's the way he played.. Otherwise, we would be praising the successor to the Joseph Swan light bulb.
Patents are a bitch, and Edison was the original patent troll.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Actually, that would have been "Consolidated Edison" eventually shortened to "ConEd". Otherwise, you're absolutely right. How much did he cheat the world from, by not funding Tesla? We'll never know.
Well, unless the conspiracy theory that Tesla managed to make himself immortal, and moved to Argentina to pursue high energy experiments for gravity control and space travel are true. I kid you not, I picked up a really good book on Tesla. The last two chapters went into this wild conspiracy stuff. What an awful way to ruin a really informative book. I was under the distinct impression that the publishers read the first few chapters, and confirmed the facts, but no on bothered to read the whole thing before it went to press.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Doesn't Warren Buffet want to change the tax laws so he makes less money?
Well you can believe (A) what a man says in political speeches or (B) what a man does in reality. In reality Buffet uses loopholes to engineer his personal pay in order to avoid taxes. He pays himself in dividends, which is taxed at a lower rate than regular income. If he wanted to pay the same taxes as his secretary he could pay himself in money, an ordinary paycheck, the same way she and nearly everyone else is paid.
Buffet favors an inheritance tax but he then gives all his money to the Gates foundation, again avoiding taxation.
Classic 1% behavior. Do as I say not as I do. Reminds me of Senator Ted Kennedy, all pro environment and green energy until someone wants to put up wind turbines that can be viewed from his beachfront property.
Edison would have loved LEDs and hated CFLs. LEDs are always DC and CFL always AC inside.
He'd be shocking animals to death with the new lightbulbs, suing Westinghouse and Tesla and everyone else, and in general acting like any other a$$hole - because that's what he was, and that's what he did, as well as cheating Tesla out of $$$ - all putting the "Con" in "Con Edison."
Uhhh...how EXACTLY is that flamebait? doesn't anyone know their history anymore? it was Edison that was frying animals and pushing for the electric chair because he was sure it would discredit Tesla and AC power and since he had DC patented up the ass he stood to make a fortune if he pulled it off. its pretty common knowledge that even after it was proven that with the tech of the time DC just wouldn't scale Edison was pushing for "neighborhood generators' belching out coal smoke to power a couple of blocks rather than admit while DC had its uses it wasn't gonna work long distance.
Sorry to burst anyone's bubbles but while Edison was a brilliant man he was also as ruthless as they come and had NO problem with deep roasting animals and people just to try to ruin a competitor. Hell Gates and Jobs didn't have nothing on Edison as i can't really picture Jobs having someone bashed to death with an IBM PC to "prove" they were unsafe.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
No, because it is impossible to prove. I call it the post-mortem fallacy: where someone argues a position is held by another who was dead long before he or she could have had any opinion on the topic. We don't know what opinion Edison would have had on the new law.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.