First is not always the best. Robert Fulton was not the first to operate a steamboat service. More innovations come from borrowing and combining than simple invention alone. When music and movie maestro David Geffen had a very rough patch, a critic jabbed that the only difference between Geffen Records and the Titanic was that on the Titanic the band was better.
After four years of losses, Geffen had so many hits he could afford an ocean liner all to himself. All Sections. About Us. B2B Publishing. He developed a hand-cranked machine called the tinfoil phonograph; as he spoke into the machine and cranked the handle, metal points traced grooves into the disc. When he returned the disc to the starting point and cranked the handle again, his voice rang back from the machine. Reporters and scientists were blown away by the invention; DeGraaf argues it helped make Edison a household name.
He took the device to demonstrations up and down the East Coast—even making a midnight visit to President Rutherford B. Hayes at the White House—and eventually organized exhibitions across the country. Edison imagined music boxes, talking clocks and dolls, speech education tools and talking books for the blind. But without a clear marketing strategy, the device did not have a target purpose or audience.
The machine also took skill and patience. When Edison revisited the machine 10 years later, he was more involved in both the marketing and the medium—which he eventually changed to a wax cylinder— and his invention took off. When he opened a lab in West Orange, New Jersey, in late , Edison decided he wanted to turn out new inventions quickly and hand them over to factories to be manufactured and sold; what he earned from those sales would be put back into the lab.
Among the first of these attempts was the talking doll. Edison crafted a smaller version of his phonograph and put it inside dolls he imported from Germany. He hoped to have the doll ready for Christmas , but production issues kept the toys from hitting the market until March Consumers complained they were too fragile and broke easily in the hands of young girls; even the slightest bump down the stairs could cause the mechanism to come loose.
Edison reacted quickly—by April, less than a month after they were first shipped to consumers, the dolls were off the market. For years, Edison corresponded with miners throughout the United States. The deposits of ore along the East Coast, Ohio and Pennsylvania were littered with nonferrous rock that had to be removed before the ore was smelted, DeGraaf explains.
In , Edison envisioned an ore separator with powerful electromagnets that could parse the fine ore particles from rocks, depositing them into two different bins. To give himself a competitive advantage, Edison constructed several large-scale plants he believed could process up to 5, tons of ore a day, DeGraaf says. After opening and closing a few small experimental plants, he constructed a plant near Ogdensburg, New Jersey, which gave him access to 19, acres of minerals.
Edison managed the plant in Ogdensburg—a change of pace for the inventor. Oh, and just one more note on the Naval Consulting Board. Unlike Tesla, who pitched "death rays" and other weapons to countries in his later years, Edison's condition to working on the board was that it would work to develop defensive technology only.
That was true for his entire existence. Edison once remarked that, "I am proud of the fact that I never invented weapons to kill. That's something Tesla can't say. In the course of researching this article, I surprised myself by learning that Tesla did not, in fact, discover X-Rays.
I'd been under the impression that he had. He played with them before Wilhelm Rontgen, that's true. But other researchers were also experimenting with them. It wasn't until Rontgen, though, that some of them knew what they were dealing with For example, Ivan Pulyui's work pre-dated Tesla's, but he didn't realize he was working with X-Rays until Rontgen published his work.
The Oatmeal also correctly notes that Tesla did identify the dangers of X-Rays and didn't experiment with them much. This then leads to one of the most morally reprehensible portions of The Oatmeal's comic, where he takes the tragic death of Edison's assistant Clarence Dally and Edison's disability as an excuse to pummel Edison again.
Here's what the Oatmeal says:. This is some of the most anachronistic, patronizing things I've ever read. Please, readers, turn the clocks back to the early s. People didn't really understand how radiation worked and how dangerous they truly were.
When it came to Edison's X-Ray experiments, the "human trials" were conducted by Edison on himself and his assistant, who readily volunteered. Not yet understanding radiation, they both took excessive doses and suffered for it. This was the fate of a lot of brilliant researchers in the early days of radiation. Like Marie and Pierre Curie, for example.
What's more, Edison was haunted by Dally's death to the end of his days. It agonized him. While Dally was alive and suffering, Edison kept him on the payroll and took care of all of his expenses until the day he died. In the early 20th Century, let me assure you that keeping employees on the payroll who couldn't work was not a common practice.
Had he worked for most of the tycoons of the time, Dally would have probably ended his days a beggar in the streets. Finally, and I can't emphasize this enough, the work that Edison and Dally did led to the development of X-Ray's as we know them today. The X-Ray in your Doctor's office? It still uses Edison's basic design. Tesla refused to experiment with X-Rays medically. Edison did do that research. And he suffered for it. But in so doing, Edison invented a device that has saved lives and alleviated suffering for millions of people.
And while Edison himself stopped using X-Rays out of fear, he did have this to say at the time when he was asked. In the hands of experienced operators they are a valuable adjunct to surgery, locating as they do objects concealed from view, and making, for instance, the operation for appendicitis almost sure. But they are dangerous, deadly, in the hands of inexperienced, or even in the hands of a man who is using them continuously for experiment.
The Oatmeal strip goes on from there, thankfully moving away from the mindless Edison bashing and discussion, in brief, some of Tesla's other achievements. Of course, during this part, he mostly gives short shrift to a lot of the brilliant scientists and engineers who developed things like wireless communications, remote controls, and other things. This isn't to say that Tesla didn't have a big hand in a lot of these inventions - he did!
But a lot of other people worked on them, too. They built on Tesla's initial work, advanced it, and developed practical inventions. That's how science and engineering works. The inventors who came after Tesla built on Tesla's work, just as Tesla built on the work of Faraday, Pixii, and countless others. The comic also makes the probably false claim that Tesla had developed a practical means of wirelessly transmitting power.
He certainly claimed to be able to do so. But there's no actual evidence that he did. Tesla was just as prone to self-aggrandizement as anyone else. Especially in his later years. What's more, there are a two things that the Oatmeal didn't comment on that I think are worth mentioning.
0コメント