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The Polymath: Lowell Wood Is America's New Top Inventor (bloomberg.com)
pacopico writes: It's taken more than 80 years, but someone has finally overtaken Thomas Edison as America's top inventor. The dude is named Lowell Wood; he was once behind the infamous 'Star Wars' space laser project, and he was a protege of Edward Teller. On July 7th, he received his 1,085th patent, breaking Edison's record. The article says he has 3,000 more inventions awaiting review at the patent office. Wood seems to be using his powers more for good these days and has become the right hand inventor for Bill Gates and his philanthropic endeavors. He's making efficient nuclear reactors, universal vaccines and anti-concussion football helmets. Quite the life.
"Wood attributes his ability to hop from subject to subject, making associations that sometimes lead to inventions, to reading—a lot. He subscribes to three dozen academic journals. 'I have a terrible deficiency of willpower once I open an electronic table of contents for Physical Review Letters or the New England Journal of Medicine,' he says. 'It's just terribly difficult to pull myself away from them. There will be these three articles that I absolutely have to read before I can turn loose of this thing. If I don't read them, I'm doomed. I'll never come back to them because there will be the next day's journals and the ones after that.'"
"Wood attributes his ability to hop from subject to subject, making associations that sometimes lead to inventions, to reading—a lot. He subscribes to three dozen academic journals. 'I have a terrible deficiency of willpower once I open an electronic table of contents for Physical Review Letters or the New England Journal of Medicine,' he says. 'It's just terribly difficult to pull myself away from them. There will be these three articles that I absolutely have to read before I can turn loose of this thing. If I don't read them, I'm doomed. I'll never come back to them because there will be the next day's journals and the ones after that.'"
Man, I hate the Tesla overrating that goes on any time Edison gets brought up these days. It's almost as bad as all the Europeans with a hate-on for America who always feel the need to chime in with some "High Lord Smellyarse of Essex actually invented it first!" horseshit any time an American is credited with inventing ANYTHING.
Tesla was a brilliant engineer, especially in his early years, no doubt. But he was also mentally unstable (especially in his later years), not-so-great at implementation, a terrible businessman, and more than a little erratic and unfocused. Edison was a much better all-around "inventor." Edison may not have been as brilliant an engineer as Tesla, but he was much more practical and pragmatic and much better at actually applying most of his ideas to practical use. The only notable exception to this was alternating current, which is Tesla's only truly enduring legacy in this modern age.
Now go ahead and mod me down, all you adoring Tesla worshipers. How dare I question the modern "Tesla as Messiah" dogma!
How ironic that Elon Musk, so known for his Tesla worship, is so much more like Edison than he ever was like Tesla--especially in his sense of self-promotion, business sense, and in showmanship. So you Elon Musk fanboys can mod me down too.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.